On Saturday night, Katt Williams arrived onstage to star in a live comedy special as part of the Netflix Is a Joke Festival. The expectation was that now, live, with no one around to stop him from saying anything he wants onstage, Williams could truly unleash all his darkest secrets and most dangerous opinions about Hollywood. Williams’s viral January appearance on the Club Shay Shay podcast, followed by a similarly headline-grabbing March appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, led to an assumption that this special would be the apex of Williams as truth-teller. He named the special Woke Foke, which is like putting out a billboard that says, “This is going to be controversial.” But by Monday morning, it was as if Williams had spent Saturday night at home on his couch. Woke Foke had come and gone, and all anyone on TikTok, Twitter, and morning-radio group chats could talk about was a different Netflix live event, one that streamed the night after Williams’s: the Kevin Hart–hosted roast of Tom Brady.
Kim Kardashian got booed. Jeff Ross was there as if no one ever pointed out anything about his past and none of it matters. Ben Affleck’s jokes were too tame, too fannish. Nikki Glaser was in peak roasting form, confident and lancet-sharp. Bill Belichick had decent writers. But the appeal of the roast wasn’t pristine joke writing — it’s what jabs get the biggest cringes in response and the sense of unmediated access to Brady’s reactions to each joke. It was about the crowd response to Kardashian, recorded without time for an editor to try to tone down the audible disgust. It’s about watching all of Brady’s crew behind him, laughing while their eyes dart around nervously, and then taking their turns at the podium, their media training warring with their palpable discomfort. Liveness provides a sense of danger and a lack of cover.
Netflix is investing heavily in its live programming, and a few underwhelming early salvos (Chris Rock’s Selective Outrage; the disastrous live Love Is Blind reunion) have bloomed into a weekend like this last one with multiple large-scale live comedy-streaming events. The goal is to recreate the television of 1997, when the communal experience of an event meant that it mattered when everyone watched together because that was the best way to witness an event firsthand. But as this weekend on Netflix demonstrates, liveness cuts both ways. Williams’s special, intended to capitalize on his reputation as a loose cannon, instantly disappeared into the cultural ether. It was acceptable and generally inoffensive as an hour of Williams comedy, and there was nothing about it that justified or tapped into the frisson of immediacy that liveness is supposed to create. It was controlled in every way — so clearly scripted and produced that certain video clips and sound cues were prepared to slot into specific lines, and so painstakingly milquetoast that the most dangerous overall stance was a bland repetition of transphobia about women’s sports. “If there are any weak and fragile men, we don’t mean to shame you,” Williams told the crowd. “But understand you can tuck your penis and go in the game with some real women and whoop the shit out of them if you want to.”
It’s unlikely that significant time in editing and post-production would’ve made Woke Foke into a classic, but it could’ve helped. Specials are designed to represent an hour of comedy at its most honed, meticulous, thoughtfully directed, and well-wrought pinnacle, with the ability to cut, select, and dial in every frame so that it best serves what a comedian is trying to accomplish. A live special is primed to be the worst possible version of the special as a form, offering all of the monumentality of a special and refusing many of the tools that make it an accomplishment. (To Woke Foke’s credit, there was clearly a considered use of the airhorn sound effect.)
Releasing Woke Foke as just another of Netflix’s many new comedy specials each year would also have avoided any sense of build-up and then deflation. More than once during the Brady roast, a reference to Club Shay Shay seemed designed to pick up on probable Williams special buzz, and instead served as a reminder of how little Woke Foke had to offer. Some of Williams’s most daring material was about Ozempic, but he declined to take that set-up any farther than Ozempic exists and it makes people lose weight. By Sunday, a half-dozen Ozempic jokes about people on the roast stage buried Williams’s empty premise (that Ozempic “is too strong”) in a pile of lines with an actual barb to them (“Jeff Ross puts the ‘ick’ in Ozempic,” Glaser said). Most live broadcasts are timely, which makes them briefly relevant and then quickly forgettable. Woke Foke only managed one of those.
But the Brady roast instantly swung into digital ubiquity. A roast, unlike a special, is a form where the art is in the sense of surprise and shock. The presentation of those qualities can be enhanced with post-production like anything else, but they’re also improved by knowing that everything that’s happening is live and unfiltered. Would Brady have really grimaced quite as painfully after that Glaser set if he’d had a choice in the editing room? Surely the Kardashian booing would’ve been toned down a little? Even if what appeared in the Brady roast was entirely prewritten, Netflix approved, and given the sign-off by a roomful of lawyers, liveness creates enough plausible uncertainty that it’s easy to enjoy the ambiguity.
Especially after the underwhelming Rock special, the weekend suggests some takeaways for Netflix’s future live programming. Live events are easiest to pull off when they’re following outcomes (like who wins a game) or presenting new information, especially when the outcome or the news is at least a little bit uncertain. Artfulness is nice (and Williams’s special is very well directed), but without the spectacle of shock or novelty, it’s hard to break through. Occasional production hiccups like a visible teleprompter or a moment of bad lighting didn’t matter, because the real questions are, How hard did that joke land? Who seemed most hurt by it? Is that person laughing sincerely, or to cover their real anger? It is sports-as-comedy, full of attacks and defenses and who can take a hit. It’s primed for a highlight reel and headlines about winners and losers. Live events turn comedy into news, but Williams had nothing to say.
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